Banding Together : Parents, Teachers Protest Plans to Cut Music Instruction

Marching bands played and parents and teachers spoke out Thursday in a chorus of protest in Northridge against plans to reduce or eliminate music instruction in Los Angeles schools hit by state-imposed budget cuts.

The protest came after the Los Angeles Unified School District notified all of its 75 full-time elementary school music instructors that they would be laid off or reassigned under plans to cope with a $317-million budget shortfall for the next fiscal year.

At least another 28 music positions in junior and senior high schools would be eliminated under the plan, which must receive school board approval in June before it becomes final.

At Thursday’s rally, teachers and parents carried signs calling for more support for music instruction.

“We have to go out there and let those people know that music is important,” said James Domine, who played violin in the Taft High School orchestra and is now orchestral director of the West Valley Symphony.

“Don’t let them get away with saying we don’t have the money,” he told the more than 500 people who attended the protest at Big Valley Music, a Northridge music store.

Marching bands from several Valley junior and senior high schools performed on the sidewalk, attracting shouts of support from passing motorists.

More than 2,000 teachers, nurses, counselors, psychologists, librarians and others received letters in March notifying them of the financially troubled district’s intention to lay them off or reassign them on June 30, the end of the current budget year. The board was required by the state Education Code to notify tenured staff members of possible layoffs or reassignments by March 15.

To comply with the law, similar warnings have gone out in previous years to many employees who eventually were retained, but teachers fear that state budget problems make the warnings more threatening this year.

Among the hardest hit are elementary music teachers.

The district plans to save $3.5 million annually by eliminating the program and reassigning its most senior instructors to other elementary subjects or secondary-level music programs, said Don Dustin, director of performing arts for the district. Those with fewer than five years on the job face dismissal, he said.

About 30 singing instructors and at least 45 instrumental teachers now serve about 75,000 students a year throughout the district, Dustin said. Teachers are assigned five schools each, meaning children already get only one period of music per week, he said.

At the same time, they instruct about 3,000 non-music teachers each year in how to teach music--freeing the full-time music teachers to be assigned to other schools each year, he said.

The loss of elementary music instruction will mean lower academic performance overall, Dustin and others predicted.

“If they don’t have music, other grades may go down,” said Kendra Hall, a music teacher at Nobel Junior High School in Northridge. “I turned kids around who were straight-fail students because they loved their instruments so much.”

The cuts also mean that elementary music teachers with only vocal experience may be asked to lead a junior high school orchestra for the first time, Dustin said. “We’re going to find the possibility of programs that were successful losing a popular teacher and being replaced by a teacher who may or may not be qualified to do it,” he said.

Moreover, Dustin said, children will now arrive unprepared for junior and senior high school band and vocal programs, resulting in an overall decline in quality in those programs.

“Essentially, we will put music literacy on the back burner,” Dustin said. “We will end up down the line with very little music literacy.”